Earlier this month, NASA announced that it had to cancel a scheduled spacewalk, citing a “medical situation” affecting a “single crew member who is stable” on board the International Space Station.
The mystery illness eventually led to the space agency staging the first medical evacuation in 25 years of continuous operation on board the aging orbital outpost, rushing four astronauts back to Earth in a move that brought the station’s number of occupants from seven to a skeleton crew of just three.
While the medical incident only affected a single astronaut, who has yet to be identified for privacy reasons, all four members of the Crew-11 mission cut their time on board the ISS short by weeks, safely splashing down off the coast of San Diego early Thursday morning.
The four astronauts were airlifted to the Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego via helicopter for a “planned overnight stay at a local medical facility for additional evaluation,” according to a January 16 statement. After being “released as expected,” they continued their journey to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they will “continue standard postflight reconditioning and evaluations.”
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“All crew members remain stable,” the space agency reassured. “To protect the crew’s medical privacy, no specific details regarding the condition or individual will be shared.”
It’s an exceedingly rare event, highlighting the challenges inherent to providing healthcare in space. While hundreds of miles above the surface, specialized care is hard, if not impossible, to execute. While astronauts undergo rigorous EMT-level training so they can respond to emergencies on board the station, they aren’t full-blown medical professionals, and can only do so much under the direction of doctors back on Earth.
There’s a lot to still learn about providing care during medical emergencies, particularly when it comes to long-duration space exploration missions into deep space. According to a 2022 study, there still are plenty of “gaps in knowledge regarding the potential for unanticipated in-flight medical events to affect crew health and capacity, and potentially compromise mission success.”
As researchers from Northumbria University in Newcastle point out in a recent essay for The Conversation, medical emergencies are remarkably rare on the ISS, despite being expected to occur on average every three years. Studies have shown that the most common health issues astronauts experience are skin irritation, congestion, disruptions to sleep, and in-flight injuries — most of which are ironically caused by exercise, which is designed to protect astronauts’ long-term health.
Spending prolonged periods in a microgravity environment has also been shown to affect astronauts’ vision and blood pressure.
Now that there’s finally been a medical emergency on the station, though, it’s unclear whether the public — or even the broader medical community — will ever find out any details.
More on the evacuation: Entire Space Station Down to Skeleton Crew After NASA Evacuation